I got this email from a friend and ASA colleague. I pass it along as it expresses my own position so very clearly -- jwb

From: "Ted Davis"

Subject: Easter homily #3

This one comes from one of the best books I've ever read, NT Wright's The
Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 717.

The question which must be faced is whether the explanation of the data
which the early Christians themselves gave, that Jesus really was risen from
the dead, 'explains the aggregate' of the evidence better than these
sophisticated scepticisms. My claim is that it does.

The claim can be stated once more in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. The actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (not a mere
resuscitation, but a transforming revivification) clearly provides a
*sufficient* condition of the tomb being empty and the 'meetings' taking
place. Nobody is likely to doubt that. Once grant that Jesus really was
raised, and all the pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle of early
Christianity fall into place. My claim is stronger: that the bodily
resurrection of Jesus provides a *necessary* condition for these things; in
other words, that no other explanation could or would do. All the efforts
to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so.

Many will challenge this conclusion, for many different reasons. I do not
claim that it constitutes a 'proof' of the resurrection in terms of some
neutral standpoint. It is, rather, a historical challenge to other
explanations, other worldviews. Precisely because at this point we are
faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in
the middle of the epistemological ocean, as yet uncolonized by any of the
warring continents. We cannot simply arrive at a topic and make grand
declarations, as in Francis Drake's celebrated annexation of California,
and suppose that all the local inhabitants will take them as binding.
Saying that 'Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead' is not
only a self-*involving* statement; it is a self-*committing* statement,
going beyond a reordering of one's private world into various levels of
commitment to work out the implications. We cannot simply leave a flag
stuck on a hill somewhere and sail back home to safety.